Newsline, July 2018

Letter from the Executive Director

It seems in these hot summer months, developing the motivation to carry on regarding anything can be a herculean effort. This past week, when temperatures hovered around 100°F (35°C) and humidity levels pushed above 85%, doing anything beyond sitting on a lounge chair under a fan was too much activity. Yet most pressed on, and fortunately for most of us in the library, publishing, and software communities that are NISO's core constituency, our work is mainly indoors and (hopefully for most of us) air-conditioned. However, that doesn't mean that our work is without its challenges, difficulties, or stressors-perhaps not as much physical as mental!

Standards development can be a long slog, particularly on an international stage. It is through the commitment, dedication, and hard work, usually from volunteers, that eventually the fruits of that labor can be seen. This is also true of standards-related work of policy to advance adoption of principles that support access to content.

This month, it is seeming likely that the Marrakesh Treaty on accessibility will finally be ratified by the US government. The Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act (S. 2559), which will allow the import and export of resources for print-disabled people around the world when non-accessible versions are otherwise unavailable, passed in the Senate by unanimous consent on June 29. The bill needed to be slightly tweaked, so was returned to the House for final approval. According to the ALA District Dispatch, "because the legislation makes modest amendments to Section 121 ("the Chafee Amendment"), the House Judiciary Committee must give their consent to the amended legislation before it goes to the president for his signature." Hopefully, this won't be much of a hurdle and the treaty implementation bill will make its way toward law. If past is prologue, the bill will pass quickly through the House and will be headed to the President's desk for signature. While noting that nothing is finished until it is well and truly done, especially in this administration, all signs are looking quite positive for adoption of the treaty this year.

Although the most recent activity on accessibility has been political, there are significant elements of this that are technical. NISO has been involved in accessibility standards for many years. The first, proprietary DAISY standard for digital talking books originated in Sweden and was first published in 1994. Release of DAISY 3, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 2002 Standard, was official in March 2002. This Standard was jointly developed by the DAISY Consortium, The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (part of the Library of Congress), and a variety of other organizations in North America, and published as a NISO standard. The standard was revised in 2012. At the same time, NISO led the development of the ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification. This standard was integrated into the EPUB standard to allow for the accessibility of e-books in this format.

It is important to remember that accessibility is not, nor should it be, a partisan issue. Senators from both parties voiced their vocal support for the treaty when it was reviewed in committee in the US Senate. The demand for greater access to the visually impaired does not know political affiliation. Because in reality, reading impairment is something many, many of us face; from those fully blind, to those with dyslexia, to those with dysgraphia, as well as those whose vision degrades with age.

Media Stories

National Implementations of the Marrakesh Treaty By Countries That Have Ratified or Acceded to the Treaty

Association of Research Libraries

On June 22, 2018, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a brief on the National Implementations of the Marrakesh Treaty. The ARL document provides a useful compilation of the provisions for implementation of specific requirements from those 38 countries that have ratified or acceded to the treaty. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) subsequently adopted the Marrakesh Treaty, which deals with establishing access mechanisms for persons who are blind, visually impaired, or operating with other disabilities. The ARL blog featured an entry commemorating the United States’ ratification of the same treaty.

Bias Detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair

Rachel Courtland, 21 June 2018, Nature, Volume 558

Tools are currently being engineered with an eye to leveraging behavioral data in the interests of better decision-making by authoritative agencies when assessing risk in areas such as child welfare or criminal recidivism. It is important that agency systems do so without unfairly penalizing specific groups or populations, but there is great uncertainty as to whether and how developers can ensure the fairness of such systems. Is it possible to hold creators of such systems appropriately accountable should a system prove itself biased in one direction or another? Lack of transparency in the algorithmic parameters of calculated risk is a key driver of that uncertainty.

To Save the Research Literature, Get Rid of the Literature Review

Richard P. Phelps, June 12, 2018 LSE Blog

Literature reviews are a staple of the publication process, but as Richard Phelps argues, they may too easily be slanted in service to the point being made by an author -- too dismissive of or actually misrepresenting relevant published materials. Attempts to peer review this particular element of a scholarly article may not scale to the degree necessary to ensure quality. One answer might be to eliminate the literature review altogether from the traditional research article.

To save the research literature, let’s make literature reviews reproducible

Arnaud Vaganay, June 19, 2018, LSE Blog

Responding to Phelps’ argument above, Arnaud Vaganay suggests that rather than eliminating literature reviews, such research assets might be refashioned so as to be both reproducible by others as well as providing the needed foundation for a particular research inquiry. Most specifically, the author suggests as a solution cumulative literature reviews (CLRs), as outlined in this 2018 conference presentation.

A Race Against Time to Preserve University Media Collections

Lindsay Mckenzie, June 29, 2019, Inside Higher Ed

There is a current urgency surrounding the appropriate preservation of at-risk audio and video formats held in academic collections. There is an in-depth, on-going, and successful initiative (the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative) from Indiana University, which has digitized “more than 92% of the audio and video collection” and is currently working on its collection of film reels. Other initiatives noted in the article include work being done at Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Southern California.

See a paper you like? PubPeer wants to help you create a “journal” around it

Allison McCook, June 4, 2018, Retraction Watch

The PubPeer Foundation announces the launch of a new site, Peeriodicals, intended to facilitate the creation of user overlay journals by supporting the creation of collections of preprints or existing articles. The rationale is that scientists are the best judges of quality research and will more efficiently direct others to the truly substantive and worthwhile outputs. According to this interview from Retraction Watch with PubPeer founder, Boris Barbour, “Peeriodicals offers broader and more creative possibilities for researchers to showcase their expertise and vision in helping their colleagues learn about the work of others.”

Implications for content and technology providers include the following quoted points:

Voice-activated digital assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home continue to grow rapidly, opening new opportunities for news audio. Usage has more than doubled in the United States, Germany, and the UK, with around half of those who have such devices using them for news and information.

Podcasts are becoming popular across the world due to better content and easier distribution. They are almost twice as popular in the United States (33%) as they are in the UK (18%). Young people are far more likely to use podcasts than listen to speech radio.

Consumers remain reluctant to view news video within publisher websites and apps. Over half of consumption happens in third-party environments like Facebook and YouTube. Americans and Europeans would like to see fewer online news videos; Asians tend to want more.

News apps, email newsletters, and mobile notifications continue to gain in importance. But in some countries users are starting to complain they are being bombarded with too many messages. This appears to be partly because of the growth of alerts from aggregators such as Apple News and Upday.

Open Access History Monograph Initiative

John Sherer, June 13, 2018, Longleaf Blog

Longleaf Services is a fully owned distribution subsidiary of the University of North Carolina Press and offers a suite of publishing services targeted specifically to university presses. The key quote from this blog posting is: “Our conclusion is that a more dramatic intervention with incentives will be required to successfully transition presses to a web-based workflow that delivers their most specialized books quickly and inexpensively in digital formats.” In the four years of its existence, Longleaf has supported university press workflows in producing specialized monographs for the market. The next phase of development is intended to encourage production of more specialized, peer-to-peer monographs towards the open access model of publishing by bringing expensive subventions down to a more customary level of a journal article publishing charge (APC). According to the article, “By offering a staged workflow with different ways of assigning the costs of publication, this model allows different funding sources to enter the stream, including not only authors’ host institutions, but also research grant funders, scholarly associations, and private benefactors of the humanities.” This pilot focuses on monographs in the discipline of history.

The intent behind the development of this plan is to “move toward a common architecture, infrastructure, and set of tools upon which individual Institutes and Centers (ICs) and scientific communities will build and tailor for specific needs.” Drawing upon input from NIH stakeholders, the plan notes goals, objectives, and implementation tactics as part of the NIH strategy.

Research Library Issues, No. 294

Barbara Rockenbach, Editor, Association of Research Libraries, June 2018

This issue looks specifically at library-faculty liaison work. Which is more important -- the functional expertise or the subject expertise of the library liaison? What skills are critical in support of the research workflow? Five major research institutions provide insights -- the University of Guelph, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of South Florida, the University of California -- Riverside, and the University of Texas - Austin. Barbara Rachenbrock of Columbia University (as issue editor) points out that the role played by library professionals is changing as are the users who engage with that professional. “Libraries are now both educating users in the digital age and amplifying the work and creations of users. Users engage in creating products and scholarship in library makerspaces, in library-based journal publishing programs, and in other innovation and experimentation activities hosted by the library.” A useful bibliography is included.

The Next Generation of Wi-Fi Security Will Save You From Yourself

Brian Barrett, June 26, 2018, Wired Magazine

The Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade group of the companies that supply and maintain Wi-Fi networks, has announced an impending implementation by its members of WPA3, a new security protocol for devices signing on to such networks. Although the transition to this new protocol will be slow (late 2019, or more likely, 2020), the Wi-Fi Alliance promises expanded encryption of data so that users may feel more confident in the use of public Wi-Fi. The improvements are also expected to make data exchange between IoT devices safer as well. But as one expert notes in the closing paragraphs of this article, this enhanced security comes at a cost. Most users should expect to purchase new (upgraded) devices as part of the transition to safer Wi-Fi.

New and Proposed Specs and Standards

ISO/TR 19815:2018 Information and documentation -- Management of the environmental conditions for archive and library collections

This document provides information on recent discussions and changes in recommendations and guidance on environmental management within the cultural heritage field. Conservation research on preventive methodologies and passive control provided by specific construction methods and renovations, developments in technology for controlling the environment, and energy and climate change issues are included. This document is intended for archives, libraries, and other institutions with large volumes of collections that are based on paper. Produced by ISO/TC 46/SC 10 Requirements for document storage and conditions for preservation.

ISO/IEC/IEEE 26512:2018 Systems and software engineering -- Requirements for acquirers and suppliers of information for users

This document supports the interest of system users in having consistent, complete, accurate, and usable information. It addresses both available approaches to standardization: a) process standards, which specify the way that information products are to be acquired and supplied; and b) information product standards, which specify the characteristics and functional requirements of the information. As defined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015, the acquisition and supply activities make up the agreement processes of the software or system life cycle. Acquisition and supply of information for users and related services are specializations of those processes. Produced by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 Software and systems engineering.

ISO 14641:2018 Electronic document management -- Design and operation of an information system for the preservation of electronic documents -- Specifications

This document specifies a set of technical specifications and organizational policies to be implemented for the capture, storage, and access of electronic documents. This ensures legibility, integrity, and traceability of the documents for the duration of their preservation. This document is applicable to electronic documents resulting from:

- the scanning of original paper or microform documents;

- the conversion of analogue audio or video content;

- the "native" creation by an information system application;

- other sources that create digital content such as two- or three- dimensional maps, drawings or designs, digital audio/video, and digital medical images. Produced by ISO/TC 171/SC 1 Quality, preservation, and integrity of information.